This might be the craziest footage of a bison attack I’ve ever seen… and I’ve seen a lot.
A tourist visiting Yellowstone National Park was seriously injured on Friday after a bison became agitated and charged him and another family member.
According to Cowboy State Daily, the footage was captured by professional wildlife photographer, Mike MacLeod, who confirmed the incident happened at the Bridge Bay Campground, south of Fishing Bridge.
You can see from the very beginning that the bison, who is most likely in the midst of the bison rut, their annual mating season, is already fired up. The man and his grandson stop to take some pictures of what they thought was a resting bison, from a fairly safe distance. But the bison sees a white truck drive by and charges towards it, and as soon as the truck drives away, it locks on the family.
Game over…
The man does his best to weave through the trees, which temporarily distracts the bison. The bull repeatedly smashes into a small sapling. But the massive bison is no match for the man and it eventually catches up to him and absolutely launches him into the air. Full send. He comes crashing down with a thud… probably a good 10-foot fall right onto his side.
The photographer tells CSD that the bison was charging everything and everything, before the man approached, and before he started filming. Unfortunately, the man had no idea how riled up this bison was when he arrived. According to the grandson, who luckily escaped without any injuries of his own, the man sustained rather serious injuries and is still being treated.
This incident marks the second bison-human incident of 2026, and as you can see from the video, it wasn’t a result of being a moron like most of the incidents in the park. The rutting bison was angry and aggressive, and they were in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The Bison Rut
Yellowstone is the only place in the United States where bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times. Today, the park is home to thousands of them, and they are essentially the closest living descendants of the massive herds that once roamed the Great Plains.
It’s hard to know exactly what the bull in the video weighed, but a mature bull can weigh up to 2,000 pounds. But as you can see, despite their bulk, they are incredibly agile. They can jump six feet vertically and sprint at speeds up to 35 miles per hour. Simply put, you can’t outrun one, especially in an open field.
However, bison are generally pretty docile save for one particular time of the year… the rut.
The “rut” is the annual bison mating season, which typically runs from late July through August. During this window, the dynamic of the herd completely changes, and the valleys of Yellowstone turn into a highly aggressive, high-stakes battleground.
Bulls will loudly roar and bellow to announce their presence to females and intimidate rivals. You will also see them violently rolling around in the dirt (called wallowing), as we saw here, to leave their scent and shed their summer coats.
Male bison are flooded with testosterone and are actively fighting for the right to mate. When two bulls challenge each other, they will lock horns and smash their heads together in brutal, earth-shaking fights. Because the bulls are entirely focused on breeding and fighting off rivals, their tolerance for anything else—including humans—drops to absolute zero. They are restless, agitated, and hyper-aggressive. They’ll charge a car, a person, and even smash into a tree… we saw all three in the video.
All wild animals have a threshold for how close you can get before they feel threatened. But during the rut, a bull’s threshold expands significantly, and anything can be perceived as a threat. Think of a drunk guy picking a fight at a bar… when someone has made up their mind and is looking for a fight, it doesn’t have to be rational. A tourist might think they are standing at a safe distance, but the agitated bull has already decided the human is a problem.
The National Park Service strictly mandates that visitors stay at least 25 yards (75 feet) away from bison at all times, which it appears as though this family was doing. However, during the rut, it is heavily advised to give them even more space than that.
As you can see, the result can be devastating.
